India Centre publications

A new Brokering Trust to Accelerate Innovation framework developed at Cambridge Judge Business School helps launch development projects through an honest broker.

Each of our research centres has unique ways to engage with non-academic organisations and, through that, to generate real world impact. This month we decided to share with you the work of the Centre for India & Global Business at Cambridge Judge Business School (CJBS).

New book by Professor Jaideep Prabhu of Cambridge Judge Business School – How Should a Government Be? – outlines the state's role in the 21st Century.

Using Bollywood films to examine energy and household appliance use across four decades in India. Energy studies are often highly technical. A new study from the University of Cambridge takes a far more colourful approach, using 19 Indian feature films to document household energy and appliance use. "Bollywood isn’t usually associated with energy research, but this study takes a very novel approach to study social science through film," says co-author Jaideep Prabhu, Professor of Marketing and Director of the Centre for India & Global Business at Cambridge Judge Business School. "While the narrative of feature films is made up, the sets, especially in the so-called 'parallel cinema', are often very careful recreations of how things looked and people behaved at a particular point in time. By applying computer-based text and visual processing tools we can mine these films for the secrets they hold. The study shows how much insight into human behaviour we can get from a seemingly non-obvious source of data and analysis." The study by academics at the Department of Architecture and Cambridge Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge is published in the November 2020 issue of the journal Energy Research & Social Sciences. The research…

"Frugal innovation" can help governments respond better to the COVID-19 pandemic, says article co-authored by Professor Jaideep Prabhu in Stanford Social Innovation Review. The concept of "frugal innovation" can help governments and civil society organisations around the world respond better to the spread of COVID-19 (coronavirus), says an article co-authored by Professor Jaideep Prabhu of Cambridge Judge Business School published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review. The frugal innovation responses so far have been based on four underlying principles: "reuse, repurpose, recombine, and, informing all of the others, rapidity", the article says. Regarding reuse, it was recently announced that the common and inexpensive steroid dexamethasone, in use since the 1960s, has been found effective in treating COVID-19. Another example: owing to the shortage of personal protective equipment, people have found creative ways to manufacture masks and shields using hole punchers and other common household devices. On repurposing, or altering current valuable research for a new purpose, Indian and Pakistani railways have turned underused trains into intensive care wards, while around the world ski goggles have been converted to safety glasses. An example of recombining or the mixing of resources is the construction of hospitals in a very short time using…

Video thoughts of participants of the inaugural edition of InnoFrugal UK, the UK’s first conference dedicated to the subject of frugal innovation and the circular economy. The inaugural edition of InnoFrugal UK, the UK’s first conference dedicated to the topic of Frugal Innovation, was hosted by Cambridge Judge Business School on 27 March 2018. The Business School partnered with Ignitho Technologies and The Nordic Frugal Innovation Society to present the event. The conference, which built on earlier successful editions of the event in Nordic countries, included presentations by Jaideep Prabhu, Professor of Marketing at Cambridge Judge; Dr Khaled Soufani, Director of the Circular Economy Centre at Cambridge Judge; and Eben Upton (EMBA 2009), Founder and CEO of micro-computer maker Raspberry Pi. During the conference, we asked some participants to share their thoughts about the conference, frugal innovation and circular economy principles. Watch the videos Amanda Calvert, Founder of Quince Consultancy and member of the Cambridge Judge Advisory Board talks about the conference and circular economy principles. Melissa Simonetto, a masters student from the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge, gives her thoughts on the InnoFrugal UK conference. Andy Clifton, Sustainability Manager – Engineering & Design at Rolls Royce,…

Professor Jaideep Prabhu says that doing more with less makes sense – whatever your location. On 26 January 2001, an earthquake of magnitude 7.9 hit Gujarat, India, killing over 25,000 people. Mansukhbhai Prajapati, a rural potter, escaped with his life but lost all his stock. All around him were people like him, coping with devastating loss and enormous practical problems. So he set out to help them in his way: he designed a fridge that would keep food fresh without electricity, using the only resource available to him – the clay with which he made pots. One of Prajapati’s small, squat fridges – the Mitti Cool – sits in the corner of Professor Jaideep Prabhu’s high-ceilinged, light-filled office at the Cambridge Judge Business School. No wires run out of the back: fill the top with water and it keeps the contents cool by the natural process of evaporation. The fridge is a superb example of the concept the Jawaharlal Nehru Professor of Indian Business and Enterprise highlights in his book Jugaad Innovation: Think Frugal, Be Flexible, Generate Breakthrough Growth (co-authored with Navi Radjou and Simone Ahuja). Jugaad, a Hindi word, is the art of overcoming harsh constraints by improvising an…

A shoe repair shop on a Dutch military base is a good example of the circular economy and frugal innovation, which will be explored at the InnoFrugal UK conference at Cambridge Judge on 27 March 2018. When one traditionally thinks of a shoe repair shop, they might envision a storefront on a busy shopping street or, in Victorian days, a lonely cobbler stitching away under candlelight. Yet tucked away on a military base in the town of Soesterberg in the Netherlands is an orthopaedic shoe repair facility born in a different era and dedicated to a very timely mission: to prolong the life of military boots and reduce the need to buy new footwear for troops, in order to save both money and resources. It’s all part of a "circular economy" initiative of the Dutch Ministry of Defence and its clothing and personal equipment unit known as KPU (Kleding en Persoonsgebonden Uitrustingsbedrif), which has embraced the "frugal economy" movement of making the most of limited resources that began in developing countries like India and is rapidly advancing in the West. "The Dutch Defence Ministry illustrates how the circular economy is becoming more important in every aspect of society including big…

Article on bloodstream infection among cancer patients co-authored by Tata Social Internship student is published in microbiology journal. An article about bloodstream infection co-authored by a Tata Social Internship student has been published in the Journal of the Academy of Clinical Microbiologists. The Centre for India and Global Business, directed by Professor Jaideep Prabhu of Cambridge Judge Business School, helps to coordinate the Tata Social Internships, which are open to students throughout the University of Cambridge. Sara Devereux, a science student at the University of Cambridge, was a Tata Social Internship student who participated in the research project on bloodstream infection at a cancer hospital in eastern India. Such infections are major cause of death among cancer patients. The study involving 683 patients was conducted over a 40-day period in 2015, looking at the correlation between suspected or confirmed infection with length of hospital stay and cost of health care. The article entitled "Blood stream infections as a predictor of length of hospital stay and cost of care in patients with cancer" was co-authored by Sara Devereux along with Dr Gaurav Goel, Kasturi Sengupta and Dr Sanjay Bhattacharya of the Department of Microbiology at Tata Medical Center in Kolkata, India.…

Inequality is the defining social, political and economic phenomenon of our time. Just 1% of the world's population now holds over 35% of all private wealth, more than the bottom 95% combined. Bad as this may seem, trends suggest that the situation will only get worse. Addressing it will involve multiple strategies working together, but one which is less well understood is how simple, affordable solutions to people's problems can make a genuine difference from the bottom up. One way of measuring inequality is known as the Gini coefficient. It gives us a useful and straightforward number between zero and one, where zero represents perfect equality where everyone has the same income, and one expresses the maximum of inequality. In the countries which make up the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) the Gini was at 0.28 in the mid-1980s, but increased by 10% to 0.31 by the late 2000s. Inequality is a global problem. In the form of absolute poverty, it exists across countries. About 4 billion people – more than half the world's population – live on less than US$9 a day. But inequality is also a problem within countries. By the late 2000s, income inequality measured…